


The Fix

by HallowAvengence



Category: Hustle
Genre: Ash is good at fixing everything, M/M, except his love life, men are really thick sometimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:06:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24665080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HallowAvengence/pseuds/HallowAvengence
Summary: There are better ways to discover your team-mate is into you.Or, alternatively, just because Ash can fix most things, doesn't mean to say he should.
Relationships: Sean Kennedy/Ash Morgan
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	The Fix

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, okay, I'm about six years too late to this party. Blame BBC iplayers amazing new policy of making boxsets available. I watched Hustle as a kid and had no idea how gay it was. 
> 
> (Also, I know about as much about m/m sex as the next lesbian. All I have a healthy imagination and all of the LOTR's films so - sorry if I like missed out a crucial part).

The biggest downside to being a fixer – besides, that is, the stress, the police, the crooks and the tiny, fiddley, grunt work – is that everyone thinks he can, well, fix things. He can, of course. If it’s mechanical or electrical, if it has got knobs or bells or damn bloody whistles, nine times out of ten he can jiffy it. But just because he _can_ , doesn’t mean to say he always wants to. For once, Emma could call a plumber, an actual plumber, when her Kevlar-like hair blocks the shower drain, or Mickey could just buy another damn electric toothbrush, or Albert could take a local class at the library to learn how to email his god-niece in Seychelles.

He can fix things. He’s good at fixing things. But, once in a while, he’d like to fix himself a bit of peace and bloody quiet.

※

“Ash,” Sean drops down into the armchair next to him, sprawling bonelessly in a way Ash carefully doesn’t think too hard about. “You’re good with phones, right?”

Ash signs, picks up the nearest paper in an attempt to hide. “I know what all the buttons do, if that’s what you mean.” He’s accidently opened the paper to the personals. MAN SEEKS WOMAN _,_ one reads, GOOD COOK, SPEAKS FRENCH, NICE TITS.

“Well, I only ask ‘cos mines stopped working,” Sean persists, the tip of his coiffed quiff bobbing in and out of sight behind the paper.

“There’s a Carphone Warehouse down the street,” Ash intones.

“Ash,” Sean wheedles and a youthful hand flits out to squeeze his knee. Ash’s stomach, the traitorous bastard that it is, flips. YOUNG MAN SEEKS HANDY OLD CODGER, Ash writes in his head, IDEALLY EASY TO MANIPULATE AND SECUDE WITH- Ash lowers the paper an inch and, _ah yes_ , there they are, PUPPY DOG EYES.

“I wouldn’t ask,” Sean presses, encouraged by the paper’s incremental dip, “but I was in the middle of something.” He sounds almost sheepish. “It’s delicate,” he adds. Then, “Please?”

Ash signs, OLD CODGER SEEKS BACKBONE, he writes, AND ABILITY TO SAY ‘NO’. He drops the paper. “No promises,” he grunts, holds out a hand, “what’s wrong with it?”

Sean, gleeful in victory, drops a blank-screened phone into his hand and settles closer to him on the sofa. Ash can feel the warmth of his arm next to his. The older man shifts backwards with a cough. “It just went dead,” Sean tells him.

“What were you doing?” Ash asks, turning the phone over in his hand, giving the power button a hopeful push.

Sean doesn’t reply.

When Ash glances at him, he’s flushed. The older man quirks an eyebrow, gives him a nudge with his elbow, although, from the fetching shade of pink the kid has turned, he can guess what Sean might have been up to. “Just… you know, stuff,” Sean hazards.

“Stuff?”

“Yeah,” Sean shifts on the sofa. Their thighs brush together and Ash suddenly regrets this line of enquiry.

He takes pity on the boy. “Porn?”

The younger man’s body twitches like a naughty kid caught sneaking sweets, “maybe.”

Ash squints at the phone, forcing his brain to focus on the task in hand. “Which site?”

Sean’s blush drains so quickly from his face Ash is worried for a second the kid is going to faint. “What?” he squeaks.

Ash waves a hand in a display of nonchalance. “You’re having a jolly, rolling the butter, creaming the candle and your phone suddenly conks out.”

Sean thinks about this for a beat, “you think I got a virus?”

“Yeah,” Ash confirms, “so, which site?”

Sean twitches again, “uh.”

Ash sighs. “Look I don’t care what it was, it could be SexyHedgehog.com for all I care. I just need to know so I can fix it, alright?” He waves the phone under Sean’s pretty blue eyes, “what kind of girls tickle your tackle isn’t of interest to me.”

Sean recoils like he’s been kicked. Ash frowns at him.

“It was just,” the boy says slowly, “the usual places. You know.”

Ash isn’t all that familiar with the labyrinthine geography of internet porn sites. He’s more of an analogue kind of man. He searches the recesses of his brain, drags a name forth. “Porn Hub?” he guesses.

Relief floods Sean’s face and he nods frantically, “Yep, that’s it! Porn Hub! Good old Porn Hub.”

“Right,” Ash says. Odd boy. “Give us an hour or two then,” he pockets the phone, “then you can get back to oiling your joints.”

Sean shoves at him, a gesture equal parts embarrassment and gratitude, and Ash cuffs his head in retaliation, careful to ruck up the kid’s perfect hair-do.

※

It takes Ash longer than expected. Mainly because the anti-virus software he codes into Sean’s phone to counter whatever Porn-Hub virus the kid has managed to download doesn’t work. Eventually, he codes a complicated any-virus defence software into the thing and it flickers cheerfully back to life as if it hadn’t just spent the best part of three hours frustrating Ash to high buggery with its refusal to function.

He nearly swallows his own tongue when he glances at the screen. No wonder he had trouble with the anti-virus code. This is not Porn Hub.

The video Sean had clearly been halfway through watching starts playing again, showing an older man, dressed – at least from the waist up – in a hard hat and high-vis work clothes. He leans heavily against the side of a bulldozer, one hand fisted in the hair a younger man, on his knees before him. “That’s good, kid,” the high-vis man says, deep and throaty, and Ash, swearing, fumbles with the pause button, throwing the phone from himself like its red-hot.

It lands on the sofa and lays there, innate and supposedly harmless.

Ash is panting. And hard. He tries to catch his breath. Tries not to think about his body from the waist down. Tries to supress the thought that the high-vis man had borne a striking resemblance to himself.

He’s not successful.

Think unsexy thoughts, he tells himself. _Albert in a thong._ He forces himself to conjure the image. _Dead goldfish. Gone off milk. The yellow colour of old urine_.

_Think of anything_ , he wills himself, _but of Sean kneeling_ -Christ! _Tofu! Denture glue! Men with long fingernails. The feel of Sean’s hair between his fingers. Athlete’s foot. Eddie’s bum crack. Sean’s mouth. Stale washing-up water. Sean’s mouth. Rotting cabbage. Sean’s mouth. Sean’s mouth. Sean’s mouth._

※

“You fixed it then?” Sean snatches his phone up from the coffee table, already tapping eagerly at it.

“Uh, yeah,” Ash says. He attempts to meet the younger man’s eye. Finds he can’t. It had taken him a cold shower, three cups of coffee and deliberately poking himself in the eye to calm himself down. And he can still feel it, the buzzing arousal laying just under his skin, only partially quelled.

“Thanks.” Sean steps closer to him.

Ash, foolishly, is without a newspaper, book or cards, stripped of anything he might justifiably stare at instead of at the man in front of him. He pins his gaze to the opposite wall instead. “Your welcome,” he manages.

There’s a long pause. Ash occupies himself with cataloguing all the errors in the plastering work on the wall. Sean will leave if he can just hold out long enough and pretend everything is fine. The kid is not particularly observant, even at the best of times. A dangerous characteristic in a grifter, but one, right now, Ash will take willingly.

The sofa dips beside him. Ash, instinctively, glances over and then mentally kicks himself for it. Sean looks ashen faced.

“You saw, didn’t you?” The younger man asks.

Ash swallows, thinks about denying it. “Look-” he starts, but Sean gets there first, holding up a hand between them. Ash glances at him again. The kid’s eyes are squeezed shut, like he’s in pain. 

“No, just let me- say something.” He gulps a mouthful of air, eyes still closed. “It doesn’t change anything, won’t change anything.” Sean’s voice is measured, composed by force of will. “I can still grift. Reel in marks, act the honey trap. Still do everything. It doesn’t change anything.” He takes another mouthful of air. “It doesn’t change anything, but if, if you can’t- don’t want me here,” he swallows, “I can go.” There is a pause. Ash gapes at him. Sean isn’t finished though. He opens his eyes, looks at Ash hard, “But Emma’s got to stay. She belongs here. You need her.”

Ash thinks about this while Sean twists his hands together in his lap. Eventually, he says, “you’re offering to leave because you like men?”

Sean nods.

Ash blinks at him. “Why?”

The younger man’s gaze snaps to him, suddenly fierce like Ash might be making fun of him. Ash resists the urge to reach out and touch him.

“Well,” he says, carefully, “it tends to be an issue.” When Ash doesn’t say anything, he continues, “It was in care. It’s the reason we ended up on the streets. People wanted Em,” he hunches his shoulders, bracing his elbows on his knees. Ash tries to ignore the curve of his spine. “They liked her so much that people were willing to take me too. Only,” he sighs, “I was never quite right. I liked dancing, hula hooping, skipping. Emma was all climbing trees and seeing how fast she could ride her bike, but I was making up plays about princes and,” he rolls his eyes, “fairies and stuff.” Ash can well imagine it. Sean is curiously soft and sweet when you get past the usual layer of bravado that coats most young men. Sean sighs again, “people didn’t like it, _me,_ so we got bounced around a lot. One day, a guy caught me, well…” Sean trails off like he can’t bring himself to say what exactly he was caught doing and Ash’s mind immediately conjures a picture of a nine-year-old Sean in scruffy clothes and a pink tutu, suddenly grabbed by a large, beefy, white-knuckled hand. He’s surprised by the rush of anger that swells in him. “Emma was furious. We ran away that night. Not,” Sean says with a causal shrug, “that the streets were much better.”

Ash knows this himself, first hand; has had a few run-ins with gangs who thought he had a little too much swing in his hips. “But why would liking men,” he says slowly, his hands are itching from the desire to cup the curve of Sean’s back, “mean you had to leave now?” 

Sean glances at him, his blue eyes guarded.

“We don’t think like that,” Ash tells him.

“No?”

“No.”

“But Albert,” Sean begins and Ash knows from the face he makes that he’s thinking about Albert’s age.

He allows himself a smile, “Albert was a soldier,” he says, gently as possible.

Sean’s blinks at him. Then frowns, “but Mickey- you’re not going to tell me he was a soldier too, are you?”

Ash laughs, “no.” As far as Ash is aware Mickey is arrow straight, but he’s also teasingly tossed Ash condoms and egged him into chasing the odd bit of trouser. “He’ll have no problem with it though.”

Sean nods. His gaze slides from Ash’s and the older man feels the space between them recharge itself. “And you?” Sean asks quietly.

A better man would fess up, Ash knows. Meet Sean’s offered vulnerability with his own. He thinks about the high-vis man in the video, his thinning auburn hair and large, capable hands. The younger man’s smooth, brunette hair and bobbing Adam’s apple.

Ash isn’t a better man. He’s a fixer. And sometimes the best way to fix something is not to break the damn thing in the first place. “I don’t have a problem with it,” he says, briskly. “Just don’t play your show-tunes too loudly.”

※

Ash spends the next week or so trying – and failing - to meet Sean’s eyes, whose gaze goes from grateful to anxious to down-right sad with every successive time Ash brushes past him, gaze firmly fixed on the floor, mumbling excuses about being elsewhere.

“You said you didn’t mind,” Sean spits at him one morning, trying to catch Ash’s arm as he shoulders past. Ash shakes him off, trying to smile but managing only a grimace. “I don’t,” he says, before marching from the kitchen as if he’s arse is on fire.

And he doesn’t. He really doesn’t. It’s just that being attracted to the new pretty young thing, who is half his bloody age, is all well and good when Sean was presumably straight and couldn’t conceivably think twice about the ugly, old geezer he kept company with. Now Ash knows Sean is, well _,_ not straight and apparently has enough of a thing for ugly, old geezers to watch videos of them being sucked off by pretty, twenty-something, co-workers… it’s different. Ash doesn’t know how to be the benign, grumpily fond mentor anymore. He feels like a pervert. And there have been… instances. He’s too old to be getting raging hard-ons in semi-public places. He’s pushing fifty, for Christ’s sake.

He hates himself for it, but until he can find a solution, his only plan is to avoid Sean as much as possible.

“You’re distracted,” Mickey informs him a couple of days later, neither accusatory nor sympathetic.

“Sorry,” Ash apologises absent-mindedly, “but this is fiddly.” He’s re-wiring a Bluetooth headset so it calls Emma’s burner phone rather than the dialled number. They are in the middle of running an inheritance con on a posh, matricidal, toss-pot.

Mickey is not fooled. Damn him. “You’re avoiding Sean.”

“Am I?” Ash intones.

“You tell me,” Mickey taunts. When Ash doesn’t take the bait, he says, “about a week ago you couldn’t keep your hands off each other.” Ash nearly solders his thumb to the table in surprise. Mickey continues breezily, “I haven’t seen that much back-slapping and shoulder claps outside of a carry-on film.”

Ash swallows, focuses on the burning pain in his thumb. “Nah,” he denies, “just been busy. Someone,” he shoots Mickey a flat look, “has been running me ragged making all sorts.”

“He thinks he’s done something wrong,” Mickey says.

“He hasn’t,” Ash says immediately. Mickey gives him a look. It’s a look that says, _I’ve got all day and I’m perfectly happy to badger you until you tell me what’s wrong._ Ash knows from experience that it’s not an empty threat. 

He compromises with partial honesty. “I’ve got something I need to deal with, is all,” he waves a hand, soldering iron narrowly missing the end of Mickey’s nose. “And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Mickey holds his hands up in surrender. “Well, whatever it is, sort it out. _Fast._ If the team’s dynamics are off, the con is vulnerable.” 

Ash thinks about calling bullshit. It’s not like Mickey hasn’t been doing his own squeaky-shoed two-step with Emma, who is considerably more prone to jealousy than Stacey ever was. But what would it achieve at the end of the day? Besides, Mickey’s right, he can’t avoid the kid forever.

He’s a fixer. Eventually, he’s got to fix this.

※

Ash endures another week of avoiding Sean, made easier by the fact that Sean himself is now equally keen to avoid him. Ash doesn’t think he’s ever felt so small, hiding in alleyways, toilets, and at the other end of bars, tables and cabs. Professionally, he’s in the shit too. If it gets out that Three Socks Morgan is squatting behind sofas and lurking in his bedroom to avoid a pretty twenty-five-year-old, he’s finished.

He considers calling Stacey. He needs her teasing, solid advice. Without her, he’s not sure he’s got the right tools for this job. Without her, he’s trying to unlock a safe with a carrot.

The team manage to take their mark though, despite a hairy moment where even the posh, oblivious twat manages to pick up on the tension between him and Sean, cracking a joke about a lovers-tiff that has both men flinching.

Still, everything looks better with 250k in your pocket and Ash rouses himself enough for drinks at Eddy’s with the team and Dicey Dave, fellow fixer in the business, who’d helped Ash source the medical equipment for the con.

Dave’s in a nostalgic mood. He watches Mickey and Emma flirt across the table with twinkling eyes and reaches over to clasp Ash’s shoulder. “Takes me back,” he stage-whispers, “cor, we sure chased some skirt in our time didn’t we, Three Socks?” His grin turns sly and Ash feels the hand on his shoulder slip teasingly down his back to rub a seductive thumb between his shoulder blades. “And a good bit of trouser too, if I’m not mistaken.”

Across the table, Sean goes freakishly still, like someone has pressed pause on him. Dave chuckles, “you always were a hit with the pretty, city boys weren’t you, Ash?”

Ash bares his teeth at his friend, but the sound of Sean’s glass being put down sharply derails the cutting retort on his tongue. Sean is staring at him, breathing heavily through his nose. His eyes flicker to Dave’s hand on his back and his jaw tightens. For a second, Ash thinks the other man is going to hit him and flinches back instinctively when Sean suddenly stands. But the boy only knocks back his whiskey and walks out.

“Christ,” Dave says, “he upset because you have or haven’t had him yet?”

Ash shoves him out of the booth.

※

He drinks too much that night, putting off returning to the apartment, finally sloping back around 3 am. It’s dark, everyone in bed, and he’s so thankful he almost trips over Emma’s handbag, momentarily overcome with relief.

It doesn’t last long.

He gets as far as the bathroom, desperate for a leak, when a foot jams itself in the door, preventing him from locking it. Sean shoves himself into the bathroom, shouldering Ash backwards until he’s crowded against the sink.

He’s pale with rage.

“You,” he grits out,” “made me think I’d- I’d-” he jabs a finger in Ash’s chest, so angry he can barely speak, “messed up everything. That I had to- to leave. That I disgusted you. But no,” he gives Ash a sharp little shove and the older man’s back collides with the sink, “all this time, you” he shoves him again, “are just like me. So, what – _what_ – is your problem, huh?”

Ash grabs at Sean’s wrists, preventing him from shoving him again and prays Sean won’t look down, because then it will be very obvious what his problem is. He tries to think through the whiskey, arousal and sheer shame, to come up with some excuse to make everything alright again.

He’s not fast enough. Sean’s eyes flick downwards, spotting the bulge in his trousers.

“Oh,” the younger man breathes, “ _oh_.” The fierce grip on his arms lessens.

Ash swallows, wills himself to look at Sean, who gazes back at him, the gears of his mind visibly spinning, calculating, weighing risk and reward – it’s the same look the kid gets when he plays poker or has to think on his feet in a con.

Sean drops to his knees.

“Sean,” Ash manages to croak. The younger man unbuckles his belt, “Sean.”

The boy ignores him, but lifts one of Ash’s hands to his hair, encourages it to grip lightly. 

Ash tries to summon the correct words, any words at all really. _I’m too old, you’re too young, we work together, what might this break beyond even my repair?_ But all he can manage is a last “Sean,” pleading and wanting, before the younger man puts his mouth around him.

※

He wakes up alone, with a pounding headache, still fully clothed. The only sign anything had happened is his belt, coiled neatly next to his head, like a sleeping snake.

When he finally manages to win the fight for verticality and woozily seek out coffee, water and paracetamol, the rest of the team are clustered at the breakfast bar, munching toast, chatting breezily, still elated from yesterday’s successful score.

Emma and Mickey are disgusting morning people, and Albert sleeps like a bird – in short, light, four-hour bursts – so their presence isn’t surprising. Sean’s is though, the kid is as much as a late riser as Ash himself, but he grins at Ash over his orange juice. The sight of that smile directed at him again makes Ash’s stomach flip and he has to bend over and breathe steadily to ward off vomiting over the kitchen floor.

Someone takes pity on him and a glass of water appears by his elbow. He sips it gingerly. A few seconds later, two pills are deposited and a hand squeezes his shoulder. He looks up into Sean’s blue eyes.

The memory of Sean on his knees, his mouth around his cock, rips through him so vividly, he groans and has to stumble for the table for fear of what might or might not be happening below the waistline of his trousers.

Mickey catches his eye, pushes a coffee cup towards him across the table. He looks pleased, _smug_ , and Ash knows, just knows, that the sly bastard has worked it out, has had a hand in it even. _Stupid, eagle-eyed git._

※

Things go back to normal. Mostly. He and Sean are chummy again, exchanging friendly banter, trading bets, drinks and back-slaps. Almost like nothing ever happened. With the exception that, a couple of times a week, Sean now appears behind him in bathrooms, deserted offices, and the passage seat of his car. They fuck with their clothes still on, standing up, quietly and quickly. They don’t kiss and Ash always comes first, so consistently dazzled by what’s happening that, by the time he remembers his finer motor functions, Sean is wiping his mouth, washing his hands and retreating, without a word, back into the world.

They don’t talk about it. Sean doesn’t bring it up and Ash doesn’t know how to. 

A week, then two, of this comes and goes and Ash begins to invent elaborate, Mickey-like schemes in which he outwits Sean into kissing him, talking to him, and undressing. He concocts a plan involving the Heimlich manoeuvre, a large bite of scallop and a pair of scissors before he realises he’s lost any semblance of bloody dignity. He needs helps.

He calls Stacey.

She answers on the second ring and trills his name happily down the phone.

“Yeah, Stace, listen, lovely to hear your voice and all but, I’ve got a bit of a problem.”

Stacey, who’s successfully rescued all sorts of pair-shaped cons with Ash, quiets immediately at his tone of sheer, utter panic. “Tell me,” she demands.

He does.

“Let me, just, clarify,” she says, half an hour later. There’s laughter in her voice. “A beautiful young man who you fancy the pants off is regularly having his way with you and you are upset because…” She pauses, supresses a laugh, “he won’t kiss you?”

“Well,” Ash says, “it’s a bit more complicated than that, but yeah, that’s the gist of it.”

“God, Ash,” Stacey laughs, “just grow some balls and ask him out.”

She puts the phone down.

※

It seems a bit of a simple solution in Ash’s opinion. But then, he’s a fixer, not a planner. Stacey and Mickey were the ones with the nose for a scheme. Ash learnt a long time ago that it generally paid off just to follow their instructions, even if it sounded completely barmy.

So, Ash takes Stacey’s advice, tries to enact it the next time he manages to get Sean alone.

This happens to be in the gloomy corner booth at Eddy’s a few days later. They are there, supposedly, to exchange research on a mark’s pyramid scheme business. But Eddy himself is in the cellar, hunting for a lager that doesn’t exist, courtesy of Sean’s quick thinking and Ash is pounced on, unbuttoned, and brought to climax - gasping hot, wet breaths into the crook of Sean’s neck - before he can so much as open the file of research he’s compiled on the mark. The moment he’s done, the younger man pulls his sticky fingers out from the gaping fly of Ash’s jeans, and is already sliding away across the booth when Ash manages to grasp his wrist, drag him back.

“Wait,” he croaks. Sean allows himself to be tugged, colliding gently with the older man’s chest.

“Ash?” He enquires, looking more surprised than someone with another man’s jizz on their hands has any right to. He’s so lovely, puzzled and pretty with his hair askew, that Ash’s carefully prepared, _would you like to go on a date with me?_ evaporates.

He kisses him instead.

Sean melts, softens in a way that makes Ash abruptly aware of all the tension that had previously been thrumming through the younger man’s body. His hands come to clutch at the front lapels of Ash’s jacket and Ash, giving in, weaves one of his own into the younger man’s hair. The other he kneads up and down Sean’s lean thigh. Sean’s kisses are desperate, eager, and sincere and Ash wonders, for the first time, what Sean had done after all those times he’d gotten the older man off. Disappeared to take care of himself alone? Paced, frantic and frustrated, up and down, trying to take his mind off things? Worked out furiously in his room?

Ash is just working a hand under the hem of Sean’s shirt to press against the younger man’s stomach, encouraging Sean to rut himself up and down on Ash’s thigh, when there is a clink of glasses behind them. They spring apart, just in time to see Eddy emerge, grumbling, carrying a variety of different bottles.

When Ash turns back to the younger man, Sean looks wrecked, clenching and unclenching his fists against his knees. He’s straining through his trousers, breathing harshly through his nose, teeth gritted.

Eddy is saying something to them both. Ash ignores him, shifting so Sean is mostly screened by his body. He gives the kid a minute or so, allows himself to watch Sean piece himself back together, waits until the younger man can meet his eyes.

He taps the edge of the table, “seven,” he says, “my room, the others will be out.”

※

The knock on his door at seven is hesitant. Ash opens it to find Sean in loose-bottomed pyjamas and bare feet.

“You’re wearing a tie,” Sean accuses.

“Yeah, well, I’m an adult,” Ash snarks. “I’m not taking you out like that.”

Sean frowns, “we’re going out? But I thought,” he waves a hand back and forth between them, the gesture clearly indicating that Sean was expecting to be ravished.

It’s tempting. But Ash has spent all afternoon gathering every scrap of courage he can find and arranging them into an emotionally honest action plan. He’s twice Sean’s age, and whether he feels comfortable about it or not, at some point he’s got to start acting like it because, otherwise, they’ll both be up Schitt Creek without a paddle before you can say _caught by Emma and mauled to death by vicious, protective older sister._ He takes a deep breath.

“Not that I wouldn’t want that,” he mimics Sean’s hand gesture back at him, “but we can’t just keep, um…”

“Fucking?” Sean supplies.

“Right,” Ash agrees, “we’ll get caught. And it’s murder for my knees. Besides,” he takes another deep breath, reflects that this is much easier with women, generally because they do all the emotional talky bits themselves. With June, he just had to nod occasionally and act as directed. “I get the feeling that you want more than that.”

Sean eyes him warily and Ash has to force the next few words out of his mouth, “I do.” He coughs, “I want more. So, we’re –uh- going out. Properly. Going-” he fishes for the right word, “on a date.”

Sean’s face is unreadable.

“If you want,” Ash adds. _Christ._

It’s hardly the most romantic of propositions. Ash wonders if he should have softened his tone, made it a bit more… seductive. Romance has never been his forte. Even as a younger man, he’d approached the business of dating with more practicality than tact.

“You want to date me?” Sean asks.

“Well,” Ash shrugs, shuffles from foot to foot, “you’re a very lovely man.” He tone is more of a growl than anything else. “Nice eyes,” he mutters. “I’m not promising nothing though,” he adds quickly, “I’m double your age, ugly as a coot, and about as biddable.”

Sean’s expressionless mask breaks into a beam, eyes huge and shiny. He really is very pretty, Ash thinks, like Disney prince.

“You’re supposed to disagree,” Ash says, mock hurt. “Tell me I’m handsome or whatever, that I don’t look my age.”

“You’re handsome and you don’t look your age,” Sean says in a dutiful monotone and laughs when Ash reaches out to cuff him.

“Go and get some clothes on,” he grumbles, “nice ones, mind. Not those pink monstrosities you like to wear.”

“They’re called chinos!”

※

They go to a cocktail joint in SoHo, very upmarket, all gold and black and dim lighting. Ash makes a goofy pretence of pulling out Sean’s high, strobe-lit, barstool for him and Sean climbs onto it with mock prissiness. Ash wants to touch him, put a hand on the younger man’s knee or shoulder, grip the back of his neck, brush hair away from his eyes, but it takes most of his dexterity just to stay balanced on his stool.

They people watch, sipping overpriced drinks.

  
A young couple in front of them, white with clipped horsey accents, are discussing adoption.

“We could just get one from China,” the woman says, “so much easier and it’s not like they don’t have a surplus.”

“Better than getting some mouthy street urchin,” the man agrees.

Sean, the epitome of mouthy street urchin, grimaces, gulps his cocktail. “Lots of marks here,” he mutters.

Ash eyes him. Sean also seems to be having trouble staying on his stool. “Too many,” he agrees. He doesn’t want to work tonight. He knocks back his drink in one very expensive mouthful, drops cash onto the bar. “Come on, I know a pub.”

※

He takes the younger man to a seedy, overcrowded joint on Euston road, frequented by good-natured criminals, among whom Ash cheerfully counts himself. He’s well known here and he enters the pub’s boozy, smoke filled room to a litany of welcoming jeers and elbow nudges. Several eyebrows are waggled suggestively in Sean’s direction.

“How did Three Socks snare a lovely thing like you then, eh lad?” Harry the Haddock – a trickster specialising in fishing fraud – asks, casting an appraising eye over the younger man.

Sean smiles at him sweetly, “I snared him actually.” 

This is met with the appropriate amount of seedy hand gestures and leering, and Ash snags a hand through Sean’s belt loop and drags him from the throng to the bar.

  
Sean buys him some pork scratchings and proceeds to gradually feel him up while he eats them, hand slipping so far up his thigh that Ash almost chokes on the last mouthful.

He swills beer round his mouth and rolls his dice one last time, “what did Mickey say to you?”

Sean plays dumb, wiping beer froth from his mouth with the back of his hand, “Mickey?”

“Mickey,” Ash confirms. “The night-” he can’t quite bring himself to say _you sucked me off for the first time_ and so settles for “after Davey, you know.”

Sean eyes him. “why do you want to know?”

“Because I’d like to know how hard I should punch him.”

Sean smiles, “he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t ask about.”

“You asked about me and Dave?”

“Yes.”

“And?” Ash prompts.

Sean rolls his eyes, “Mickey said you’d seduced so many bright-eyed boys and girls in your youth that it’s a wonder you haven’t needed both your hips replaced.”

Ash clears his throat, “he’s one to talk.”

Sean shrugs. “Then he said, for a fixer, you were remarkably thick and couldn’t sort out your own life if it came with play-by-play instructions.”

Ash gapes at him, “He didn’t?”

Sean hums, “he also sprouted some vague waffle about going after what you want, but I’d mostly stopped listening at that point. Think he was probably just trying to tell me to get on with it,” Sean waves hand in the direction of Ash’s crotch, “fuck you.”

Ash swallows. “Well,” he says, “well.”

“How hard a punch does that warrant?”

Ash considers the dregs of his drink.

“Only,” Sean adds, “he was right, wasn’t he? You are terrible at sorting out your own life.”

Ash flushes, “I asked you out, didn’t I?”

Sean shrugs. “How long did you want me before you did?”

The older man shifts. It would be easy to lie or to say nothing at all, try and distract Sean with a joke or a touch.

“The video?” Sean guesses, “when my phone broke?” Ash shakes his head. Sean frowns. “When we helped Benny?” Ash shakes his head again, rubbing a hand across the back of his eyes. “The-the business with my dad?”

“No.”

“Ash-“

“When I passed you the blood bag,” Ash says quietly. “In that warehouse you and Em were squatting in.”

It’s mostly the truth. He’d been drawn to the kid even before that. When he was just the assistant to the snide, bitter mark Emma was playing. That seems a little too pathetic to admit though, even with his new policy of emotional integrity.

Sean finishes his drink, glances at Ash from beneath his lashes, shy, pleased and exasperated. “Same,” he says.

_Jesus,_ Ash thinks.

Sean shifts closer, not quite looking at him. “You going to ask me out again?”

“Dunno,” Ash says, even as knocks their together beneath the table. “You put out?”

Sean kisses him.


End file.
